


nothing here to hold me

by starflan



Category: Anastasia (1997), Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25920349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starflan/pseuds/starflan
Summary: He isn’t leaving forever, he promises himself, promises her from afar, and a part of him wonders if maybe he should text her back, tell her that it’s not her fault he needs time to be in his own head to console the decade old hurt that’s come back to bite him.( This time it's Dmitry's past that's haunting him. )
Relationships: Dimitri | Dmitry/Anya | Anastasia Romanov (Anastasia 1997 & Broadway)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

Dmitry leaves the night he finds out, the cool air stinging his face as his feet lead him to the old bar down the street. Sitting shoulders hunched and twirling a beer bottle between his fingers, he thinks it might be better to just down a couple of shots and let the drunken haziness overtake his mind for the rest of the night, but he doesn’t. There’s something so unnervingly familiar about the grief that’s resurfaced, something that makes Dmitry question what he’ll do next and that alone stops him from ordering a round of vodka. He hasn’t felt this helpless in a long time, hasn’t let the past catch up to him since he was a teenager, and all at once, it comes rushing in without so much as a warning.

The alcohol doesn’t help nearly as much as he thought it would, stinging the back of his throat and tasting more bitter than he remembers, but it distracts him from the buzzing of his phone against his leg. He isn’t leaving forever, he promises himself, promises her from afar, and a part of him wonders if maybe he should text her back, tell her that it’s not her fault he needs time to be in his own head to console the decade old hurt that’s come back to bite him. Anya has always been more of a worrier than he has, hands wringing and teeth hitching on the edge of her glossed lips, but thinking about her right now makes his stomach twist and he pulls out his phone only to silence it.

The bartender watches him steadily above the rim of the glass he’s polishing, and offers him a sympathetic smile that lifts the edges of his salt and pepper moustache, some unspoken reassurance suspended in the still air between them. Dmitry wonders how many broken people this bartender has seen, how many stories are written out in their drink orders and tabs when he’s passed a second bottle “on the house”. 

He tips the man a five, and gets a room in a cheap hotel half a mile from home, missing the warmth of her body pressed against his and her whispered goodnight in his ears.

* * *

He dreams of a city with vibrant, onion domed spires scraping a sky almost as blue as her eyes and the sound of the Neva lapping hungrily against the sides of the canal. It tastes like home, warming his heart beneath his ribs, and for one blessed moment, he thinks he sees his father’s face-- a flash of a familiar smile too much like his own and brown eyes exhausted from revolution. But it all collapses in too fast, a glint of guns and handcuffs, leather boots scuffing against the ground and the grunts of police officers ushering a struggling man away.

Dmitry wakes with a start, heartbeat thundering in his ears against the faint sound of traffic, and he reaches out into the empty expanse of the bed, hand reaching in vain for someone who isn’t there. He hasn’t had a nightmare in ages-- he’s the one who’s meant to console, brushing tears away on the pad of his thumb, her jagged breaths on his neck-- and he wishes she were here, fingers cupping his cheek, but another part of him knows that he couldn’t bear to look at her eyes. Eyes so blue, they’re undeniably Romanov. Eyes so blue, they reflect her politician father’s.

He swallows hard, picks up his phone from the nightstand to a full screen of text notifications. It’s Anya, he realises with a swell of guilt in his throat, a weight dropping in his gut as profanity spills from his lips. Legs swing off the bed, elbows on his thighs and he glances down with bleary eyes, fingers tapping out the same message in five different ways.

* * *

The walls are bare, blank white and cool against his shoulder blades when he leans back, his head tapping against the drywall. She’s pressed to his side, a giggle in her throat at their meager set-up-- a crate in the middle of their living room balancing a stack of thin paper plates and a grease stained pizza box.

“We could just unpack the card table,” Anya points out, head tilting towards the scatter of boxes and loose furniture at the mouth of the flat. It’s been sitting there for a few hours now, slowly dwindling at a snail’s pace.

“We could,” he agrees, lifting his soda can with a whine on his tongue. “But then I’d  _ have  _ to unpack the chairs too.”

Her hand whips against his shoulder, knuckles carelessly slapping skin, but her eyes are aglow with laughter and her lips curve into a knowing smile. “You’ll have to do it eventually.”

A groan meets her words and he turns, reaches over to gently pinch her forearm. “Yeah, later.” Although Dmitry can’t promise how soon “later” entails. “Besides, I don’t see  _ you _ doing the heavy lifting, Princess.”

“That’s what I have you for.”

He snorts, steals a pepperoni from the slice on her plate. “There’s a moving fee, you know.”

They finish half the pizza between laughter and banter, and Anya clears the crate while Dmitry unearths their mattress from beneath a stack of boxes. She’s optimistic when she joins him in their bedroom, taking over the impossible Ikea instruction manual for their new bed frame, sorting screws into little piles and directing him to put together pieces of wood before rereading the instructions and changing her mind. It takes them three hours to assemble it, which is two hours longer than the manual advertises, but Dmitry still holds out his hand for a triumphant high five when they finally set the mattress in and collapse against it.

“Not too shabby, hm?” He turns with an arch of his brow when she burrows into his side, leans down to press a kiss to her hair. “Just put the pillows and the sheets on, and it’s practically home.” There’s a sarcastic lilt in his voice, his hand vaguely gesturing towards the scarce room, but Anya just grins, wraps her arms tightly around his waist and his heart swells against his ribcage.

“Anywhere with you is home.”

* * *

Now perched on the edge of the hotel bed, the cotton sheets spun in a whirl behind him after a restless night alone, Dmitry takes ten minutes to type out one text. He can see her face with every message he rewrites, can see the concern softening her eyes and the apology on her lips, and it nails his conscience, makes him want to tell her he’s okay and he’s sorry for even worrying her in the first place. But she’d see through his facade in an instant. She always does.

Instead, he tells her he’ll be home soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a very tentative first fic attempt, so please let me know your thoughts!! i've never used ao3 before, but i am trying to ease myself back into writing cohesive pieces, so we'll just see where this goes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i want it noted that i have ZERO clue where this is going, but it's definitely going /somewhere/. it's all pulled from a mesh of various headcanons and verses i made with a friend, so let it be known that this fic is officially listed as an example under "winging it" in the dictionary.

Vlad picks up after the second ring, his voice weary and grave, like he knows the exact reason behind this phone call. It strikes a nerve deeper in Dmitry when he realises that Anya must have called a hundred times before him, asking if they were together, asking if he was okay.

“Dmitry.” His name is breathed out in greeting, tone strewn with relief.

Throat tightens and suddenly Dmitry isn’t sure why he’s even dialed his friend’s number, why he thinks he’s ready to disclose what’s causing the ache in his chest. “Hey.”

“What’s the occasion, my friend?” To his credit, Vlad pretends like he doesn’t know that Dmitry isn’t home, pretends like he doesn’t know that his friend’s one sense is his stubborn self-preservation.

“I…” A beat. “Back in Russia-- before you knew me-- did you ever hear about my father?”

There’s silence on the other end, and Dmitry can sense the other man’s apprehension, hear the hesitation in the low humming of the connection. This isn’t the question Vlad’s been expecting, but Dmitry isn’t here for advice or sympathy-- he just wants the blunt truth.

“... There were rumours, but there have  _ always  _ been rumours in politics.”

* * *

She’s tracing stars on his shoulders, fingernail gliding gently over his bare skin, her expression more pensive than usual.

“What’s on your mind?” His voice is low, as if not to disturb her from the idle task she’s working on. The morning light is filtering through the blinds into their room, painting her hair golden, a tangled halo framing her head.

“Just all the things I used to dream about when I was a little girl…” she pauses her tracing for just a moment, pulls the duvet back over her shoulders before she resumes. “... Back at the orphanage.”

“Like what?”

Anya glances up at him, her fingers running down his arm to the crook of her elbow, edging closer to him on the bed. “Like, where I came from… And what kind of prince would come and whisk me off.” There’s a giddy flit in her voice, like she knows exactly what she’s doing when she adds the latter part.

Dmitry decidedly doesn’t take her bait. “Where did you dream you came from?”

A bashful smile lifts the corners of her lips, faint pink blossoming beneath her cheekbones. “I used to dream about the Eiffel Tower, and living in a castle with all the sharlotka I could ever eat.” A beat, her smile evolving into a grin. “Too bad I’m stuck with you instead.”

“Hey!” Mock indignation sharpens his voice as he rolls to hover over her, but the charade falls all too quickly when all she’s doing is laughing, and he’s suddenly kissing her along her jaw, down her neck. He only stops when she pushes his face away, sitting up to catch her breath, and his heart flutters against his chest.

Now Dmitry’s looking up at her, sun bursting behind her head, and she looks beautiful. And God, he wishes he could give her the world. “What if we could find out where you came from?” 

Anya’s snort follows his tentative query without a beat of hesitation and she shakes her head, settles against the headboard. “There aren’t any files on me. I already asked the orphanage, remember?”

“But that was years ago.” Dmitry straightens up to meet her gaze. She’d gone back twice, five years apart and still so lost in the world before she’d resigned herself to the unknown. He remembers the look on her face after the second time, how he’d bought her ice cream to console her and wash away the bitter defeat. “What if you took, like a DNA test or something like that? You know, ancestry.com shit.” 

“You want me to  _ spit  _ in a tube?”

“Don’t you wanna know?”

Anya is quiet for a moment, slumping back into her pensive expression as she chews on the edge of her lip. Dmitry likes to think he can read through her expression, that after all this time he should be able to know how she thinks, but all he can see is conflict in the depths of her eyes. “I do, but…” Her hands are wringing. “I  _ like _ being Anya too.”

It dawns on him. She’s spent years shaping an identity from scratch with her past like a distant dream— enticing, but unattainable— and she isn’t ready to abandon the person she’s made herself to be.

“Hey, hey,” His hands stop her fidgeting, lightly resting atop of hers. “No matter what, you’ll still be Anya to me.”

And there it is, that simple quirk of her lips. “Well, just for that,  _ maybe  _ I’ll consider spitting in a tube for you.” Anya ignores his scoff when she presses a kiss to his cheek.

* * *

Rumours are usually a load of bullshit. That’s what Dmitry’s learned from living on the fly— you can’t always trust that the man down the corner is planning on robbing a grocery store when you hear it until once in a blue moon, sirens are going off and there’s the too familiar sound of handcuffs clicking into place around slender wrists and one less man sleeping on the streets with you. He’s grown to be a cynic at heart, and it’s probably the wariness that’s kept him alive this long, but Vlad has always indulged in rumours, at least humouring them if he didn’t truly believe them.

So when Vlad is unwilling to relinquish more than one line of gossip from his old political days, Dmitry can’t help but feel suspicious and he hangs up unsatisfied.

“They didn’t like him, of course, but that’s politics for you. Not everyone can agree.” He’d murmured nonchalantly, but Dmitry knows his friend, knows the cautious lilt in his voice when he lies.

“What else?”

Vlad had sighed unwittingly, “Dmitry, m’boy, it’s just politics.”

And Dmitry had grown tired of hearing the same excuse over and over again.

He raises his head, phone still warm in his hands, and steels his gaze to the view out his window-- silver cityscape, buildings as far as he can see, their bricks weathered with age-- so close to home and yet so far away all at once. He spends the day walking around New York City, hands shoved into his pockets as he tries to grasp at memories of a Before he’d known. There’s the cafe` he’d meet Anya at after her classes, and the bodega they’d spent too many late nights in picking out snacks for impromptu movie nights that mainly consisted of her nodding off against his shoulder.

Without her, the places seem dull and Dmitry feels just a bit lost in the city he’s come to love so much.

“Mitya!” He pivots at the sound of his name, watches some girl with hair as dark as asphalt chase after her lover on the other side of the square, and he bites the inside of his cheek, thinking about the girl who would call after him.

He should have been happy when the parcel arrived, wrapped in plastic with her name and their address printed on top, right? The DNA test had been his idea-- something they could have never afforded back in Russia, but a chance to give her what she’s always wanted. And when she had reached for the results, she’d grabbed his hands hard, looking for somewhere safe to land.

She couldn’t have helped what was in that envelope, Dmitry knows, but the thought still sours his mood.

When he gets back to his hotel, he calls Vlad a second time and this time he’s even more direct than before.

“Anya’s results came back yesterday.” He starts after the niceties, swallowing hard and wishing for a drink.

“She mentioned that. Something about wanting to be called Anya, not Anastasia or--”

“ _ Anastasia Romanova _ , Vlad.”

The line goes dead for a moment, silence thick with shock before Vlad indelicately breaks it, his voice lower than usual.

“Mother of Moses. Romanov-- like Nikolai Romanov?” The names come alive when he hears them aloud, indelible and definite. “ _ The politician Nikolai Romanov _ ?”

A breath. Dmitry's voice trying not to waver.

“The man who killed my father.”


End file.
